Lego Wars

So mr. delagar and the kid have been having "Lego days," all week -- he's been home with this kid this month while I taught Summer II -- which means, ai, Legos all over the front room. And I mean ALL OVER.

Anyway, Friday mr. delagar decided, having put together several large tanks and a dictator, to do a film production -- I jest not -- a biopic of Idi Amin's life, The Lego Version.

Since then he and the kid have been painting backdrops, building sets, doing research, setting up scenes...last night they shot the first scenes, which I admit are lovely (did I ever mention that mr. delagar does short films? Oh, yes).

You'll recall he's meant to be doing his dissertation this summer. Well. I'm sure a Lego biopic of Idi Amin fits in there somewhere.

He showed me the out-takes this morning. (It's digital, so, you know, no waiting!) They were nice. I giggled anyway.

"You're not taking this seriously!" he accused.

Oops.

The Patriarchy Again

An interesting comment by Amanda over at Pandagon -- this is just part of it; it's in a discussion of this post here.


Our behavior makes more sense if you look as us as individuals trying to negotiate our survival and that of our children with the knowledge that we’re interdependent. With that in mind, it appears the patriarchy is a social system that developed when human males realized what female bonobos already know; if you band together you can dominate the other sex. Dominant females don’t have much reason to dominate too cruelly, though; they mostly seem interested in using their power to set up matrilineage and to keep males from harassing females. But dominate males want a lot more from females than just decent behavior; since females have wombs and males don’t, there’s a heightened interest in controlling females from cradle to grave. Thus, the patriarchy, which is a subtle alliance between men throughout history to keep women maintained as a sex-and-breeding class, utterly dependent on men for their economic survival.

Chimpanzees would like to dominate females this way, but they don’t control the females’ economic resources, so they’re sort of stuck.


The patriarchy is crumbling, by the way, because women have learned what our bonobo sisters already know; you band together and you have more power.

It occurs to me that this is why the Wingers hate women who work, and women who won't marry, and women who don't want kids, and women who "act like men," as they put it, meaning women who talk back and don't submit, and any woman who they see as escaping their spiky iron fists -- because it's not just a choice, for them, as it is for us.

For me, that's what it always was, and for me, therefore, their anger was a bit bewildering. Why would they get so bent about women who wore pants, and wanted a college degree, and didn't want kids, or didn't want to get married, or didn't want to take her husband's name? What was that to them? Surely this didn't have anything to do with their lives, did it? Why should they care if I said fuck, or I prefered the study of Greek to having six kids? That's my choice, isn't it? I don't care if they choose to go to church and have twins, do I?

But this makes their temper clearer: because they do care what I do, because to them it isn't just choice. What they see is that feminism lets women be free. And that means that that some women have escaped the cage. (The love of a good man, James over there on WorldNut put it, but it does start to look oddly like cage, when you examine their premises: women who have jobs leave it more often, women with educations leave it more often, women with access to birth control reject it in droves...hmmm...why does this not sound like something women are choosing because they feel loved and cherished? Why does it sound like oppression?)

Who will stay a slave when the door is open? Not too many.



[Now to be clear, I do not believe all relationships are oppressed relationships: people can partner up and work out decent relationships. It can be done. (At least, I'm hoping it can.) It can't be done, though, on the basis of one of those people exploiting the other.]

Bias In The Schools!

So I was over there at World Views Again (I know, I know, but I can't help it) and they were on about Churchill, who, you might have heard, has been stripped of his tenure for plagiarism.

The Far Right is as obsessed by this Churchill fella as they are by the Clintons; no one else much cares about him. Still, apparently someone ferreted out academic misdeeds, including plagiarism and falsify data, and his university board fired him for academic misconduct, which, if they had evidence that those things were so, was pretty much what they had to do.

Is the Right happy? Silly you! This is not the university policing its own! This is those Evil Leftists firing Churchill for His Speech! (See Althouse, see the Worldnuts.) Those Evil Leftists, who are always SAYING they want free speech, firing a man for speaking! See? See? We told you the Left was a Police State!

Oh -- and BTW? -- those College Campuses (the Right can't tell a university from a college if you give them a week to try, so don't even go there) are filled with nothing but Churchills and other assorted liberal idiots, so those things Churchill was saying? That's the climate on our campuses today!

I argued with them a little, before I had to go teach. It's like arguing with someone who speaks a different language, though, and lives on a different planet -- because they do, you know. It is a different planet, over there in Winger World.

I was thinking of this during my class. It's a 1213 class, so we're working on doing research, setting up a research question, a research notebook (these aren't actual notebooks anymore, they're virtual, but whatever), figuring out what you actually know (I always explain Plato's definition of True Knowledge here, so I can point out to them how little they actually do know -- well, they think they know there isn't enough parking on campus, but actually they only have a true opinion about that: so how can they turn that into actual knowledge?) -- anyway, someone raised the question, when we got to doing research, of what they ought to do if their research proves their thesis wrong?

"Ah," I said. "Excellent question."

This is what I always say: because someone always asks this question.

"Let me tell you a story," I say, and then I tell them the story about my student in Idaho, furious because she was working long hours to pay for her degree, while "those prisoners" were getting their degrees handed to them in prison, which was not justice! So she wanted to argue that prisoners should not be provided with free college classes while in prison. All right, I told her: go research that.

"Couple weeks later," I said, "she came back to me and said --" I always pause dramatically here. "Well, you tell me. What did she say?"

Someone always knows: "Her research was showing that prisoners should be educated."

"So it was," I agree. "How come?"

"Educating prisoners makes them less likely to commit crimes once they get out."

"Yep. So she says to me, all my research goes against my thesis. What should I do? And I said, hmm. What should you do? And she says, um. Change my thesis? And I said, ding-ding-ding."

They all laugh at this point.

"But this is a key point," I tell them. "We are not doing research simply to shore up our convictions. We are doing research to find out what reality is -- what the truth is. If our research does not support our thesis, then, yes, change the thesis. Now she does not have to change all the way to Educate The Prisoner! She could change to, oh, Educate the Prisoner And the University Student. Why *are* we building prisons and not funding higher education? Because I tell you what, that's an interesting question. She could go that way and have some fun.

"What you cannot do," I say, and I get all grim here: "What you can't do, is ignore the evidence. Because then what are you doing?"

They look puzzled.

"You're writing lies," I said. "This is a serious business, what we're doing here. We're shaping the world. If you shape it on lies, that's going to make problems."

"You said we could make up stuff," one always objects at this point.

"I said you could make up illustrations," I said. "That's different. And you have to make it clear they're illustrations. Like fables. Like parables. You don't think Jesus's parables were true stories, do you?"

Since they have never read the Bible, most of them, they have no idea what I'm talking about now. I repress a sigh.

"You're using little fables to make a point, sometimes," I say patiently. "Which is different from ignoring evidence to support a false thesis."

This might be too much for them, I decide, studying the faces, half of which are confused.

One kid raises another objection: "What if most of your evidence says one thing, and then just a few pieces say something else."

I brighten. "Outliers! Well! Those are always fun." I talk about the dinosausers and the impact crater and the K/T boundary and how for a long time no one believed that theory and now how most people do; I talk about global warming and how it was contraversial for a time but now it's mostly not; I talk about Mike Males, and the work he's doing with violence and children. "Most of us, for a long time," I explain, "we bought the kids-are-violent-because-of-violent-media, which really, when you think about it, makes no sense at all. Mike Males, about twelve, fifteen years ago, started putting out papers and books arguing that kids are violent because adults act violently toward them."

The whole room stiffened up.

"Yep," I said. "Everyone reacted just that way. He was an outlier. This can't be true! No! It's not because their parents beat the hell out of them, because police officers assault them, because teachers whale on them. Nah. It's got to be the movies and that nasty rap music."

"Spanking doesn't hurt kids," one of my students said, furiously. "It teaches them a lesson. If more kids today got whipped, we'd be in a better world!"

I smiled at her. "Yep. That's what we want to believe. Consider it a minute. What's more like to make a kid violent -- something he sees on a TV screen, or something he sees in his own house? Something he hears in a song, or something that gets done to him?"

"My daddy licked me," she said, angrily, "I'm not violent."

"Good point," I lied. "People didn't believe Mike Males at first. He was an outlier -- but he kept compiling evidence, and other people start compiling evidence, and it starts to look pretty compelling. I mean, everyone watches violent TV and movies. Almost no one is actually violent. Who's actually the most violent in our society? Well, it turns out to be those who are treated most violently when they're young. Which societies are most violent? It turns out to be those who treat their children with the most violence. Once you look--"

"Spanking kids isn't treating them with violence!"

I paused, because part of me wants to attack her -- having had my own violent childhood, after all -- and because, good shit, whipping a kid isn't treating it with violence? On what planet?

Oh, yeah. Planet Winger. I draw a breath.

"Well," I say. "Define spanking for me."

She stares at me.

"Studies on spanking -- and there have been hundreds in the past dozen years -- say spanking a kid won't do much harm. But these studies define spanking as one or two slaps on the hand or bottom, and they restrict the act to a child under four or five." I stand looking at her. "Is that how your daddy defined the act?"

The woman behind her snorted. "It's not how my mama defined it," she said.

The rest of the class laughed. My Winger sat glowering at me. I moved on. But it occured to me, as I continued to talk about Outliers and what to do about them, that this was indeed the sort of act that those folk over at World News were talking about when they said the universities were full of Liberal nutcases who were undermining the country.

That's what they would say I was doing, there in that classroom.

Because what did I do? I challenged that woman's worldview. I told her her daddy's way of rearing children -- and her church's, no doubt -- was wrong. I told her not to rely on Received Wisdom, but to examine the evidence, and rely on that. I said sometimes things that Authority said were wrong things, even if we had been doing them for generations.

Huh, I thought. Look at that. Wingers are right. I am undermining them. It's because they're fucking wrong, because their worldview is destructive and broken, but they're right about what I'm doing.

Oh, well, though. It's my job, isn't it?

Meanwhile? In Texas? They're undermining my worldview. The pigs.

Last week, Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed Don McLeroy to head the State Board of Education. Unfortunately for Texas schoolchildren, McLeroy has, for years, fought against the teaching of fact-based science in public schools, instead casting vote after vote in favor of his religious ideology. According to a recent Austin American-Statesman editorial:

In 2001, McLeroy and a majority of the board rejected the only Advanced Placement textbook for high school environmental science because its views on global warming and other events didn’t comport with the beliefs of the board majority. The book wasn’t factual and was anti-American and anti-Christian, the majority claimed. Meanwhile, dozens of colleges and universities were using the textbook, including Baylor University, the nation’s largest Baptist college.

(Via PZ)

Money For Nothing

If you haven't heard the fuss over that Brooks column in the NYT, ho.

And ho, ho, ho.

Brooks claimed that our ecomony is doing splendid! Honest! (Apparently some Rethug hack told him it was, probably with numbers written on a cocktail napkin, and you know Dave, he believes anything with numbers, especially if it's written down by a Rethug.)

Well, anyone who actually has been living in America over the past seven years, watching her paycheck, or his paycheck, buy less and less each month, seeing his or her life get more restricted each quarter (so much for a vacation...all right, so we won't go out to eat this week...no, I guess I won't get new glasses this year...nah, we don't really need a new jacket, do we? The old one is still good enough...) knows what crap this is, but Dave? He bought it and swallowed it and printed it up.

Ezra Klein spent all day yesteday tearing Brooks a new one. Amanda has it all collected here.

Why Take Chances?

Why not be afraid?

Why not lock up the innocent?

Because, you know, it is much safer -- the police state is -- so long as you're not the subset being policed against against, of course, the Jew or the Muslim or the working class or the socialist or the fruit picker or whoever, and really, come now, what are the odds of that?

We're never the ones the storm troopers come for, are we? It's never our door the sheriff comes banging on in the middle of the night.

Theodore Dalrymple argues here that it only makes sense to distrust the Muslims among us -- to be intolerent.

(This is a growing meme among the Right, by the way, who have been seeking, since well before 9/11, sane reasons to justify their distrust of the Other. The War on Terror has only given them some bigger stick to point with.)

...despite [my] friendly and long-lasting relations with many Muslims, my first reaction on seeing Muslims in the street is mistrust; my prejudice, far from having been inherited or inculcated early in life, developed late in response to events.

The fundamental problem is this: There is an asymmetry between the good that many moderate Muslims can do for Britain and the harm that a few fanatics can do to it. The 1-in-1,000 chance that a man is a murderous fanatic is more important to me than the 999-in-1,000 chance that he is not a murderous fanatic: If, that is, he is not especially valuable or indispensable to me in some way.

And the plain fact of the matter is that British society could get by perfectly well without the contribution even of moderate Muslims.

Dalrymple's arguement here is clear and logical: sure, the Muslim you see might be a hard-working, useful member of society. Odds are (he says -- where he draws this number I don't know -- out of his ass, I suspect) a thousand to one that he is. But one Muslim in a thousand is an Evil Terrorist! (Um, really? One in a thousand? Yikes.) So -- we should lock all Muslims up! Because who wants to take that chance? Really?

And he's not prejudiced! He's just Experienced!

(I heard exactly this argument about black folk, back in the day, in a bar in Fayetteville, Arkansas, from a drunken sorority girl. It did not impress me then either.)

Here's more from Theodore:

A friend who met me at the airport said something that must by now be true of many ordinary British people. Just as we used to wonder, on meeting Germans of a certain age, what they had done during World War II, so she wondered, when she found herself next to a young Muslim on a bus or a train, what he thought of the various bombings perpetrated by his co-religionists and whether he might be a bomber. She found herself looking for the nearest exit, as we are all enjoined to do by flight attendants before the plane takes off, in case of the need for swift exit.

There are reasonable grounds for suspicion, of course. Surveys — for whatever they are worth — show a surprising, and horrifying, degree of sympathy, if not outright support, for the bombers on the part of the young Muslim population of Britain. They show that a large number of Muslims in Britain want the implementation of Sharia law and think that murdering British Jews is justified simply because they are Jews.

"Surveys show" and Theodore's "friend" is a racist and so, therefore, we should -- well, Theodore carefully won't say the words "imprison" or "round up" or "deport" or "progrom." But what does he think he's asking for, with this little essay? He's calling for us to classify people based on their ethnicity, to condemn them for crimes no one has yet committed. He's encouraging his society to pander to its basest instincts. People will rise to the mark you set them. What outcome, exactly, does Theordore expect?

Oh Noes! Not the Books!

Over on Whirled News, they don't want the brown people using their libraries. For reasons of, from what I can tell, national security.

Leave it to New Haven, home of the bleeding heart since 1969. The famously liberal Connecticut city is offering to validate illegal immigrants under a controversial, first-in-the-nation ID card program. Reuters reports:

Starting Tuesday, New Haven will offer illegal immigrants municipal identification cards that allow access to city services such as libraries and a chance to open bank accounts.

Give a lawnboy a book, he'll build a bomb, you know.

Animal Farm II

The kid is reading Animal Farm.

I was talking about it in re our surreal political situation, and she said she wanted to read it, was it scary. Not scary, I hedged. Depressing.

I dug out our copy and browsed through it, making sure it wasn't scary (we're still about nine hundred dollars in debt for therapy over the War of the Worlds fiasco), chewed my lip over the Great Pig Purge, and then decided to let her go ahead.

Now she's reading it. I can't remember how old I was when I read Animal Farm. Not nine, I'm certain. mr. delagar claims he was eight when he read Marx for the first time, which may well be true. (His family had a set of those Harvard Classics, and he read straight through them.) He says he went to school and told his third grade principal that her pencil should belong to the state -- which, given that it likely did belong to the state, is kind of funny, in retrospect.

Anyway, she's been reading away all afternoon. Asking me questions. Making comments. "Are animals really this oppressed?" "I'm not eating bacon ANYMORE!" "Where are all the female pigs?"

I explained to her about metaphor. Can't wait until she gets to the end. I forsee a giant storm at house delagar tonight.

Sex Ed

You might have heard the fuss: Obama had the nerve, when he was asked about sex ed for kids, not to weasel and snivel. Yep, he said, kids ought to have sex ed classes. Yep, as early as kindergarten. It ought to be age-appropriate, clearly, but it ought to start then, and it ought to continue on up through high school.

http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/198169.aspx

As you can imagine, the Wingers and the idiots are frothing and exploding in outrage.

If you want to be deeply depessed, go to Google and put Obama kindergarten sex ed into the search string. Don't just read the stories or the blogs, most of which are Winger blogs: read the comments. The level of ignorance, idiocy, and racism has to be read to be believed.

Well, the ignorance and idiocy makes more sense when you remember this is a Winger meme that Rush and his ilk have been passing around for years -- that public schools are teaching five years old about anal sex, that they're teaching three years old how to give blow-jobs, that they're teaching six year olds the logistics of golden showers and bondage; and once you know that none of these tools has ever been near a public school, much less a kindergarten sex ed class.

I have -- the kid did kindergarten at the public school six blocks away, before we moved her into Montessori (which, sadly, does no sex ed). She had sex education from the first month. What did they learn? They learned which parts of their bodies were private places, and what they ought to do if someone touched them in those places without their permission. They learned that no one was allowed to touch them in those places, and that if anyone did, no matter who it was, that was a bad thing; and what to do if that bad thing happened.

They also learned the proper names for their various body parts.

Call me a whacky liberal, but I had no issue with these classes. Five seemed a bit late to be starting them, in fact, if you want my opinion.

Further, if these folk would look around at kindergarten curricula, I'd be willing to bet that's what going on in most sex-ed classes at that level -- radical shit like that.

More fun, though, I suppose, to declare those evil public school teachers are out to destroy America by teaching five-year-olds how dildos work and that butt-fucking is fun!

Animal Farm

This brings to mind the last few pages of Animal Farm.

That's meant to insult not the pigs on the cruise, btw, but us: we're the ones who gave the farm away, after all. We let them decide that some pigs are more equal than others, after all, didn't we? We're still letting it happen.

You're Reading What?

You might have noticed the minor contretemps, out in the blogosphere, started by this smug column, by Ron Charles, where he congratulates himself for being too grown-up and clever to read Harry Potter.

I'd feel better about the reactions to this column, which are nearly all scathing (see Lauren, who has collected some for us), if the commentors then didn't go on to make it clear they, more or less, agreed, in principal, with Charles.

That is, they too see reading as a Serious Goddamn Big Deal, something you do, like taking your vitamins, or, well, going to temple. Or, I don't know, the Gym? As if their library card ought to have No Pain No Gain stamped on the back of it.

As an English professor, this makes me edgy.

What's with this "good" book/"fun" book dichotomy? Texts are texts. If you don't like the puppy, don't read it. As Ben Franklin pointed out, all knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.

So leave Moby Dick alone if you're not interested. And Faulkner, for heaven's sake. (Me, I liked Faulkner, when I was 24. Now I find him a windy old class apologist. Things change.)

What is wrong with reading books written for children, or SF, or mystery novels, or, to choose a specific example, Charles Portis's True Grit? Nothing. I read a great deal of children's fiction, as a matter of fact, and not only because I have a nine year old. Some of the books written for children are fine books. Try Hilary McKay some time. Cynthia Voigt is also very good. Some of the best writing out there is being done in SF right now --China Mieville springs to mind, and Richard Morgan, and Octavia Butler, who, sadly, died a few years ago, at the height of her career.

Read widely, that's my advice. Some of the books being pushed, today, as literature are nice enough. Most, though, eh.

Oh! And you know what's not getting enough attention right now? Graphic novels. I read an excellent graphic novel about nine months ago, The Rabbi's Cat, by Joann Sfar.

Also, it doesn't have to be reading. Reading is my vehicle. If DVDs or music or art (or graphic art or cartooning or something I haven't thought of) is someone else's vehicle, then it is. It's all our culture. We make these boxes, we make these rules. We need to get over that. Human expression. Nothing human ought to be alien to us, and as elevated as it makes us feel to sneer at someone else because their form of expression looks inferior to ours, well, keep in mind you're either doing yours because you like to do yours or because you don't. In the former case, it's no sacrifice, is it? And in the latter, you're a fool. Grow up and move on.

Edit: Also, this, via Three-Toed Sloth.

Hi-IQ?

Read Here!

Not Likely, but...

Don't I only wish the rich and young could be enlightened by being shown poverty's face?

In real life, the Young Turk From Yale would shrug and say, about the poor, "Hey, they shoulda stayed in school and studied something useful, then, shouldn't they?"

Now What Now?

Y'all know I like to lurk about on the Winger blogs, just to keep my eye on what the other side is doing these days. Well, a few days ago I had the notion I might start bringing home some pelts for you, as it were. Why not share? That's what I thought. (Or: why I should suffer? Why not y'all, too?)

So I've been collecting! Here's some snippets, just for you!

These two are comments, off that blog run by the Christian Magazine, World Magazine. Not everyone over there is a rabid loon, but yikes, enough are. This is the lot that got all fretful b/c one of their crew posted an ancient essay by R.A. Heinlein (a sappy one) all about how Americans!were!GREAT!because we're so true and good by nature, always willing to help a fella out. Why did this upset them? Why, it was blaspheme, of course! Americans, like every other human in God's creation, are not good by nature: we're evil. Original sin, duh.

Anyway, here are two comments I collected for you:

This first is from a discussion about whether a H. Clinton/Obama ticket would succeed:


That ticket would have all the gravitas of a carnival side show.
Step right up and see the amazing "Tatooed Woman" and her perfoming midget, "Obama Man."
There are many who love to see such shows. We had an eight year run of one in the 90's. It also turned out to be an X-rated "peep show" in the Oval Office with the "Tatooed Lady" looking on. What gravitas the libs brought to us with that act!
Would Hillabama be a sequal? They are usually never as good as the original, but it is not for lack of trying. If the American public gives this freak show a second chance, we will deserve whatever is behind the curtain.

Posted by: Michael Martin at July 17, 2007 01:49 PM

And this second is from a discussion of that report that showed that teens today were both having less sex and tending to use birth control when they did have sex:

This is the whole program of radical feminism: hate men, use them, and of course, BE like the worst of them.

Radical feminism's design is to get girls to disdain men, all the while trying to turn into men themselves. Be promiscuous! Marriage is a chattel contract! A baby is like an alien taking over your body! Abort it! Abort it again! A women should never face a consequence for promiscuous sex! It's totally insane, but hey - that ideology has infiltrated every university campus for the last 30 years - and swept millions of young women (I mean womYN) into it.
Of course, the ultimate in radical feminism is to become a lesbian! Don't shave your legs or your armpits; dress like an Arkansas hunter; grow facial hair, and only have sex with other womYN and plastic devices.

Or, a young woman could opt for becoming a lady, and finding a man to truly love her for all her life.

So many choices...

James


Lots of these comments are going to be about feminism -- this is not because I'm self-selecting the ones about feminists; it's because, no matter what the topic is, wingers keep bringing it back to feminism. Re James above -- that topic had nothing to do with feminism. And yet! Why do you suppose the Right is so obsessed with those evil, hairy-legged feminists? Why do you suppose the hair on our legs obsesses them so? Why do you think they're so worried about us escaping the control of some "good" man?

Hmm. Could that answer start with a P?

Here's our third example. It's from the Althouse's site:

A comment on, you guessed it, the Clinton question (the only thing the Right is more obsessed about than feminists is Clinton).

PatCA said...
One reason I'm glad Hillary is running is precisely because it will bring out all these inconsistencies and incoherence in gender politics and identity politics in general. And I predict the one who panders to women the most will lose the biggest.

Someone once told me I write like a man. I took it as a compliment.

Commentors at that post are of the opinion that Clinton should not run because (a) she's a woman (b) she's ugly (c) ugly women are bad women (d) she's only running because she's a woman -- that's identity politics! which is bad! (e) she's only running because she was married to Bill (f) she's a cunning evil politician and they don't trust her, and her recent crafty campaign moves just go to show this (h) she's a woman (i) and ugly too.

Obama, on the other hand, should not run because his middle name is Hussein.

Over here, on Dr. Helen's site, Rusty explains to us about marriage:

Marriage is a social and legal construct, and in my opinion it is intended for the protection of children. I believe it was created because of the high likelihood that a heterosexual couple will naturally produce offspring, whether they plan to or not. So given that gay relationships do not naturally produce offspring, I see no need to extend marital legal rights to gays. Further, I would find it frightening to say that if a gay couple became parents, they could marry, because there will be some that will seek parenthood just to justify this arrangement.

So I don't see any reason to extend the definition of marriage to include anything other than one man and one woman. There are other means of creating a legal bond between any two people, something I realized when my wife and I bought our first house, because we closed on the house and became homeowners one month prior to our wedding.I view the gay marriage thing as just another push by gay rights activists to be in my face and force their lifestyle into the accepted main stream.

However, I do not regard gay marriage as the biggest threat to marriage. Far and away the biggest threat to marriage is the radical feminist initiatives that have invaded our legal system and gone so far as to make marriage unbearable for men in that they risk the loss of everything just by saying "I do."

Included in this is the notion of reproductive choice. Men have no choice. Even if they use birth control themselves, their wives can go out and get themselves pregnant and stick the husband with the economic burden. This imbalance is a gross contradiction to the notion of gender equality.

But then equality isn't what the feminists have in mind.

Rusty

Here, Neocon explains why we invaded Iraq. Something to do with seatbelts, apparently. Who knew!

One of the things he mentioned was that the cars he rode in invariably lacked seat belts. No, it wasn’t because the automobiles were old. According to Totten, it’s because the Iraqis had purposely ripped out the seat belts. Why?

Apparently it’s a point of honor (as in honor/shame culture; see this and this) in many Arab countries to do away with the protection afforded by seat belts. In their eyes, this shows bravery.

According to Totten, some taxis still sport seat belts. But they are somewhat like vestigial organs; the drivers take it as a personal insult if you put them on or even indicate a desire to wear them. “What’s the matter,” they say, “don’t you trust my driving?”


And finally this, which I submit without commentary:

Good Guy Death Star. No Girls Allowed.

I tell The Boy two stories each night. The content varies with my level of inspiration and alertness, but occasionally I will hit upon a subject that The Boy will insist on revisiting and embellishing.

And that's how The Boy's Good Guy Death Star Adventure Series began.

The Boy, or Master of the Galaxy, as he prefers to be known in his adventures, asked me to tell him a story wherein he saves the day. So I invented a story about The Emperor and Darth Vader bringing the Death Star to earth, and The Boy being the only thing that could stop them.

This proved a popular tale. So on subsequent evenings The Boy ended up defeating the bad guys and taking over their Death Star.

"Only, pretend that it's a Good Guy Death Star now," said The Boy.

"Okay."

"And, I live there with all my buddies and star wars good guys," he added.

"Okay."

"And pretend that it's only for boys, except you can live there too, mommy."

"Okay."

Then he thought for a minute.

"But everyone needs to know that it's a good guy death star, so we'll put a sign on it."

"What will it say?"

"Good Guy Death Star. Oh, and Boys Only. No Girls Allowed."

"So you're orbiting earth in a death star with a sign on it?"

"Yeah. And it's just a plain gray death star."

"How about some red racing stripes?"

"Okay. And on the back, a picture of me beating up the Emperor with my light saber, so everyone knows it's okay because it's just me."

"Sounds good, son."

Later versions of the tale had The Boy's death star being pursued by a sparkly pink death star full of girls who wanted to play with The Boy's transformer toys. Fortunately a detente was reached before the galaxy was destroyed.

It's times like these that I wish I had some artistic ability - the mental image of The Boy's Death Star--with sign, poster and racing stripes--being pursued by another, pink and sparkly death star - is too good not to share.

No! No! No More!

I saw my first Thompson 2008 bumper sticker on the way to work today, driven by, yeah, you guessed it, some idiot in a big silver Hummer.

Tailgating in the right-hand lane: what else?

Go read this.

(Via the Bitch.)

Poems!

AWB has a poetry bleg going on that is making me very happy.

I like to tell my students I hate poetry, and you know, in one sense I do. I hate to write poetry, and I hate to write about poetry, and on many days I hate to mess about with poetry and when someone in our writing group brings in a poem I get this tiny sinking feeling, because, well, most poems suck. And me, myself, I am no poet. I don't know how to write it, I don't know what to do with it, I don't know very much about how to fix it. (I suspect this is because I was brought up in a house with no music -- we didn't even own a radio when I was growing up, didn't get a stereo until I was maybe nineteen, the only music I ever heard was music on the bus driving back and forth to school, so I know nothing about rhythm or sound except what I've picked up on the street, as it were.) I did like poems as a kid, but it was all the bang-bang-bang sort of poems: Kipling, Noyes, Lewis Carroll.

But on the other hand: a good poem.

There's nothing like it.

Here's some of my favorites off that bleg so far:


Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

Philip Larkin

(Linked by Ben Wolfson)

And this, which is too long to copy here.